5 Questions With Twitter’s Global Online Sales Leader

Richard Alfonsi talks conversions and app-install ads

Twitter’s Richard Alfonsi, head of global online sales, said that the next mobile ad products on the platform will be ones that drive consumers to act right within their tweets—email signups and app downloads. So, Twitter, already known as a place for brand messaging, is focused on this direct response advertising, too. Alfonsi sat down with Adweek to share what Twitter is working to deliver marketing-wise.

On brand plays: We’ve been really strong with advertisers across the entire spectrum of goals, and mostly kind of focused to begin with with larger advertisers on the upper-funnel, brand-oriented goals—engagement and awareness—and that’s always going to be part of our DNA.

On moving further down the funnel: What we’ve been working on for quite a while now is really building a product set to help us serve lower-funnel goals—conversion, transaction, direct response, performance-oriented goals.

On conversions: With performance-oriented advertising most people think about it in terms of conversion. Conversion can be capturing a lead, an actual transaction, it can be some event that’s moving people tangibly through the funnel, and typically it’s very, very measurable.

On converting on Twitter: Any ad campaign is focused on targeting, creative and measurement, and what does the creative let you do. Already we have some ad formats that let you convert right within the tweet, and the best example is what we call lead-generation cards where you capture email addresses with one click, which works great on mobile because it’s kind of hard to convert on mobile when you have a lot of fields to fill out.

On future ad potential: You could imagine the extension of these down the road. We’ve got a version of this in beta for mobile apps where you can actually do an app download—that’s also a very seamless experience. And we’re going to really think about other ways of using this card structure to be able drive traffic to websites and to enable other opportunities for conversion within a tweet.